New 'Your Party' - Mudslingers' Same Old Attack Playbook

If you want to understand how political momentum actually gets rebuilt, look past the headlines and focus on two plain facts: people can be won back, and ideas travel faster than organisation. After the shock of a split on the left, attracting a wave of disillusioned activists and voters is the phase that looks dramatic but is, in practice, the straightforward bit. The hard part is surviving the second act — the moment when opponents, the media and well-funded smear operations stop treating the new party as a curiosity and start treating it as an existential threat.

That is when courage matters more than charisma. That is why Zarah Sultana’s willingness to meet accusations head-on may be the single most important asset the project has. 

They have called it many things: an insurgency, a splinter, a rerun of 2017. Its founders have tried to learn the right lessons from Corbynism — keep the energy, keep the mass appeal, sharpen the policy platform — while also promising to avoid the mistakes that burned them last time.

The launch of the new left project has already put a spotlight on what voters left behind in Labour (bread-and-butter economics, radical housing and transport pledges) and what they feared they lost (coherent organisation and a defence against institutional pressure).

Those policy grooves are fertile territory: radical proposals can magnetise young people and trade-union networks in a way technocratic centrism rarely does. 

Which sounds like good news until you remember how the last insurgency was felled. Momentum and sympathy are vulnerable to narrative. A party with real teeth and real numbers will attract attacks — some fair, some dishonest, and some designed purely to frighten donors, unions and wavering MPs.

When the smears come - and they have already started - the playbook will be familiar: leak a private remark, amplify a fringe tweet, conflate criticism of a government policy with hatred of a people. Those tactics don’t just cost a few votes; they persuade gatekeepers to close ranks. They make broadcasters hunt for scandal rather than substance. They persuade undecided voters that this new force is not just radical but reckless or dangerous.

This is where Sultana’s stance matters. She has not shied away from uncomfortable conversations about antisemitism — even criticising past approaches as a “capitulation” to definitions she argues constrict legitimate political debate — and she has insisted on a politics that can both denounce Jew-hatred and defend principled criticism of states and policies.

That is a difficult tightrope, and it will be seized on by opponents on both the right and the centre-left. But there is a strategic advantage to being blunt and principled from the get-go: it denies your detractors the usual montage of equivocation and U-turns that can be framed as cover-ups or weakness. If you are clear, accountable and swift in addressing genuine cases, you deprive the smear merchants of oxygen. If you fudge, they write the script. 

“Getting back to where we were” — rebuilding local parties, winning back union activists, filling community halls — is resolvable through organisation, decent canvassing and a clear manifesto. But surviving the second act is more political theatre than logistics: it is narrative control, rapid response and moral clarity. It means training spokespeople, agreeing protocols on complaints, and being ruthlessly transparent about investigations.

It also means preparing to win the argument in the court of public opinion: not by shouting louder, but by refusing to let genuine small amounts of abuse be overblown and used to create mass hysteria. 

There is a second risk that can’t be ignored. A left split of this size could hand a tidy gift to the parties on the right — Reform or their equivalents — who can make a coherent case to voters unsettled by a fractured opposition. That is not alarmism; it is arithmetic. A protest vote that is split across several left parties reduces the only practical check on the centre-right.

So yes: the new party must be bold in its principles, but it must also be pragmatic in its alliances and run disciplined campaigns in key places to avoid an outcome that helps the exact forces it wants to resist. 

The lesson from 2017 and everything since is twofold. First, ideas win hearts and can be mobilised quickly; policy and passion remain the fastest route back to respectability beyond the socialist faithfull. Second, credibility is not merely earned in the manifesto — it is defended in how you respond when the lights get bright and the smears start.

Sultana’s bluntness about past failures may anger some allies, but it also signals readiness: she is signalling that this time the movement will not be felled by a slow, avoidable implosion. That alone may be what determines whether the new party is a fleeting wave or a durable force. 

If you want a tidy ending: building a movement is the easy, exhilarating bit. Holding it together under sustained, cynical attack is the test. Politics rewards those who prepare for both. The new left must not only be able to win votes — it must be able to survive them. And in a moment where shrill headlines and manufactured scandals can decide outcomes before ballots are cast, what looks like boldness on day one may be the difference between revival and ruination.